1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a transfer roller cleaning apparatus that cleans a transfer roller of a wet type electrophonic photograph printer that transfers a toner image which is formed on an outer peripheral surface of a photosensitive drum onto a printing surface of a recording target medium via the transfer roller using a developer consisting of a liquid toner and a carrier liquid to print images, and to an electronic photograph printer that is provided with the transfer roller cleaning apparatus. Priority is claimed on Japanese Patent Application No. 2011-252853, filed on Nov. 18, 2011, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference.
2. Description of Related Art
In the wet type electronic photograph printer that transfers a toner image which is formed on an outer peripheral surface of a photosensitive drum onto a printing surface of a recording target medium (paper) via the transfer roller using the developer consisting of the liquid toner and the carrier liquid to print images, a technique is widely adopted which is provided with a cleaning blade that scrapes out residual toner on the transfer roller surface in order to remove the residual toner of the transfer roller surface after transferring the image onto the recording target medium.
Furthermore, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application, First Publication No. 2010-122252 also discloses an apparatus (an electronic photograph printer) that is provided with a carrier liquid supply device that supplies the carrier liquid to the transfer roller surface so as to effectively remove the residual toner from the transfer roller surface, and a cleaning apparatus having a cleaning roll that is rotated adjacent to the transfer roller surface, and adsorbs and recovers the residual toner from the transfer roller surface by being applied with bias voltage of the opposite polarity to the residual toner of the transfer roller surface.
The apparatus (the electronic photograph printer) of the related art disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application, First Publication No. 2010-122252 has a configuration in which a carrier liquid supply device and a cleaning apparatus serving as separately independent units are provided so as to be separated from each other in a circumferential direction of the transfer roller. For this reason, although a satisfactory cleaning effect is obtained in the apparatus of the related art, a relatively large space is necessary for installing the carrier liquid supply device and the cleaning apparatus. Furthermore, two devices (the carrier liquid supply device and the cleaning apparatus) are necessary. For this reason, it is difficult to reduce the manufacturing cost of the device, various work such as operation and maintenance, and the control thereof are complicated, and thus an improvement is required.
Since the apparatus (the electronic photograph printer) of the related art has a configuration in which the residual toner is dissolved in the carrier liquid applied to the transfer roller surface using the carrier liquid supply device, and the residual toner is recovered together with the carrier liquid using the cleaning apparatus, there was a problem in that the consumption of the carrier liquid is high.
The present invention was made in view of the above circumstances, and an object thereof is to provide a transfer roller cleaning apparatus and an electronic photograph printer that is easy to operate, maintain, and control, that utilizes a small space and operates at a reduced cost, and that consumes less carrier liquid.